The following monologues are used for the audition for acceptance into the Performing Arts Academy - Acting Division.
Please choose one of the selections and prepare for you audition.  These monologues are also used for the Acting 1 actors during class project.


WOMEN’S MONOLOGUES:

 

 

UNCLE VANYA by Anton Chekhov

 

Sonia:  I’m homely, no getting around it. I have pretty hair?  That’s what they always tell a homely woman.  “You have pretty hair, nice eyes.”  You know, I’ve been in love with Dr. Michail Lvovitch for six years.  I love him more than my own mother. Every waking moment I hear the sound of his voice, feel the touch of his hand.  I keep watching the door, hoping he’ll come in.  Here, for instance, I come to you just so I can talk about him.  He’s out here every day now, but he doesn’t give me a tumble.  It’s killing me!  Tearing me up inside!  I don’t have any hope anymore, none!  I approach him repeatedly, talk to him, looking into his eyes. I’ve no pride, I can’t control myself.  Yesterday I lost control completely and Uncle Vanya, I love him.  All the servants know it.  Everybody knows!  But he doesn’t know I’m alive.

 

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ELEEMOSYNARY by Lee Blessing

 

Echo:  Uncle Bill hardly remembers you, you know that?  He remembers grandma even less. He doesn’t have a picture of her!  Not even in his mind. To him she’s just a woman who lived a big, embarrassing life. They all think they’ve saved me just in time. And not just from Grandma- from you too!  So I started wondering if maybe they weren’t right?  Maybe the best thing would be to forget you completely… and Grandma.  I mean, what were you ever to me except a voice on the phone now and then?    So I started looking around the room, and it was real nice and clean and blank. And I thought, I could start a whole new life here. I could flourish even. The same way you did.  I could live without the one thing I wanted. But I kept hearing that voice, that voice on the phone, hiding behind spelling words, sounding so….. wishing. A sound that said “I love you but I failed you.”  I hate that sound and I will never settle for it because no one failed me. No one ever failed me. Not grandma and not you.  I am a prize among women.  I am your daughter.  That is what I choose to be. Someone who loves you.  Someone who can make you love me….nearly all the time. So I’m staying with you.  I am going to take care of you.  I am going to tend you.

 

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BORN YESTERDAY by Garson Kanin

 

Billie:   I got this letter today.  From my father.  I can’t get over it.  It‘s the first time he ever wrote me in about eight years.  We had a fight, sort of.  He didn’t want me to go with Harry. My father works for the gas company.  He used to read meters, but in this letter he says how he can’t get around so good any more so they gave him a different job.  Elevator man.  Goofy old guy.  He used to take a little frying pan to work every morning and a can of sterno and cook his own lunch.  He said everybody should have a hot lunch.  I swear I don’t know how he did it.  There were four of us.  Me and my three brothers and he had to do everything.  My mother died. I never knew her.  He used to feed us and give us a bath—buy our clothes.  Everything.  That’s why all my life I used to think how someday I’d like to pay him back.  Funny how it worked out.  One night, I brought home a hundred dollars and I gave it to him. You know what he did?  He threw it in the toilet and pulled the chain.  I thought he was going to hit me, sure, but he didn’t.  In his whole life, he never hit me once.  Hey!  I just realized I’ve practically told you the whole story of my life by now practically.

 

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THE MOONLIGHT ROOM by Tristine Skyler

Sal:  What do you know? Your mom’s with someone. She’s happy. My mom barely goes out. She says she’d rather stay home and clean the apartment. I’m not even allowed to have friends over because they’ll interfere with her depression. And she doesn’t want to wash her hair. Sometimes she goes a whole week. I tell her that if maybe we had people around she would start to feel better. But she doesn’t listen. She’ll sit there watching “Jeopardy” and badmouth my dad. The same speech I’ve been hearing since he left. On and on and on and on. And then when he comes over to pick me up, she puts on lipstick!!! She doesn’t wash her hair, and she has on the same outfit she’s worn for three days, but she puts on lipstick!! I swear one night I’m going to go out, and I’m just not going to come home….I just don’t want to call her.

 

 

MEN’S MONOLOGUES:

 

THE NOTEBOOK by Wendy Kesselman

Warren: I have a secret. A terrible secret. No one knows. No one in the world. Except my parents. They have to. They live with me. But my secret…I like to read. What am I saying… “like.” Get up every morning, go to bed every night, breathe, dream, tremble, live to read!...I mean, I’ll read anything—cereal boxes, graffiti…But books! That first moment with a brand-new untouched book. Running my hand over the sleek shining cover. Opening it in the silence of my room. That first page. Those first words. And you know what’s even better than a new book? An old one. The worn leather cover, the soft secret smell! What hands have touched these pages, devoured these words in some faraway room long ago? War and Peace. My favorite! Exactly one thousand, four hundred and forty-four pages long. Why does it have to end? I bought it from this amazing man at a secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side. And in it I found the one person I’d waited for my whole life, the person I’d die for, my favorite, my only heroine—the radiant, the divine…Natasha! But I can’t go into that now.

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THE GLASS MENAGERIE by Tennessee Williams

Tom:  Look Mother, do you think I’m crazy about the warehouse?   You think I’m in love with the Continental Shoemakers?  You think I want to spend fifty-five years of my life down there in that celotex interior! with fluorescent tubes?!  Honest to God, I’d rather somebody picked up a crow-bar and battered out my brains—than go back mornings! But I go!  Sure, every time you come in yelling that bloody Rise and Shine!  Rise and Shine!!  I think how lucky dead people are!  But I get up.  I go!  For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say that is all I think of.  Oh, God! Why, Mother, if self is all I ever thought of, Mother, I’d be where he is—GONE!  As far as the system of transportation reaches!  … Please don’t grab at me, Mother!

 

 

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 LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO  NIGHT by Eugene O’Neill

 

Edmund: The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you couldn’t see this house. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul.  Everything looked and sounded so unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned years ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was a ghost of the sea.  It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost….Don’t look at me as if I’d gone nutty. I’m talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it.?

 

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MARCUS IS WALKING by Joan Ackerman

 

Henry: You know I’m normally pretty witty, my friends think I’m funny, but when I’m with you my, I just, my tongue gets shipwrecked on my teeth.  I have to say that it’s not entirely pleasant being so completely smitten by you.  There’s actually quite a bit of pain involved that…a lot of pain I can’t do much about, but….Lisa, you touch something so deep in me… I felt it the instant I met you, I had to run out of the room. Your voice, your language, these phrases you come up with—“loaded for bear,”  “boardinghouse reach” when you reached across me in the conference room for pizza, “boardinghouse reach” I love that, I just…how you talk, your eyes, your handwriting….I love watching you watch things, I do, I could watch you watching things for ever… your sense of….I’m babbling I know not very likely making much…if I can just at least try to express….No one has ever made me feel the way that you do.  I know, I realize it’s my problem, I’m not dumping all this on you,  I’m the one who has to deal with it, but I am in love with you……..I guess we should go.